Sharing Images In and Out of Your App

Your app can do two things with images: share them out to other apps (the easy part) and receive them in from other apps (the interesting part). This guide covers both.

Heads up: receiving shared content uses the experimental share extension API from expo-sharing. It works, but Apple could change how share extensions launch the main app target in a future iOS release. Keep that in mind before shipping to production.

What you need

npx expo install expo-sharing

That's it for the dependency. But receiving images requires a config plugin, a native rebuild, and a few pieces wired together. Let's walk through each one.

Sharing images out

This is the straightforward side. You already have Share from React Native:

import { Share } from "react-native";
 
async function shareImage(fileUri: string) {
  await Share.share({ url: fileUri });
}

Call it with a local file URI and the OS share sheet pops up. Works on both platforms, no config plugin needed.

Tip: If you're sharing a generated or cached image, make sure the file actually exists on disk before calling Share.share. Passing a stale or deleted URI will silently fail on iOS and crash on some Android versions.

Receiving images from other apps

This is where it gets interesting. When a user is in Photos (or any app) and taps "Share > Your App", a few things happen under the hood:

1. The OS launches a share extension (a separate target in your Xcode project)
2. The extension hands off the data to your main app
3. Your app wakes up with a deep link
4. You intercept that deep link, route to the right screen, and process the images

Let's set each piece up.

Configure the plugin